Tolino Vision 3 HD Review

The Tolino Vision 3 HD is the best e-reader to come out of Europe. This device destroys anything that Kobo has released in the last few years and completely blows away the Nook Glowlight Plus. It gives the Kindle Voyage a run for its money and actually surpasses it in a number of different ways.

Hardware

The Tolino Vision 3 features a six inch e-Ink Carta display with a resolution of 1448 x 1072 and 300 PPI. Interacting with the touchscreen is very intuitive because its completely flush with the bezel, which is rare when it comes to designing e-readers.

The Vision 3 is completely waterproof, which means you can read this device in the bathtub or bring it to the beach. The Micro USB ports do not have the little rubber flaps that are on the Kobo H2o or a number of smartphones.

e-Readers have a very hard time with getting LED lighting right. The vast majority of companies to include a front-lit display in their products often face the challenge of the screen appearing blue. I am happy to report that the Vision 3 is basically on par with the Kindle Voyage, in terms of screen clarity. Tolino never mentioned how many LED lights they have along the bezel, but there appears to be six.

Software

The UI of this device is very clean and does not have slew of features that will confuse new users. The homescreen includes your library, with the last three e-books you have opened. There is also a small carousal at the bottom of the screen that showcase new and notable titles from the Tolino bookstore.

You can set this device in many different languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and German. Whatever language you employ will totally change the menu options and the entire user interface.

Obviously this e-reader is aimed at a German speaking audience but it does have full support for Adobe DRM. This will allow you to easily import in your EPUD or PDF collection into the e-reader via Adobe Digital Editions.

The overall reading experience is very solid. Changing the fonts, font size and alignment is very similar to the experience that Amazon provides. This makes switching to this e-reader from an Amazon product very intuitive and the learning curve is very small.

Wrap up

If you live in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland or other region where the German language is popular you would be daft not to purchase this e-reader. It surpasses almost everything on the market and gives you a very solid reading experience at 159 Euros.

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times.